P5. Digital Magazine Feature
Introduction (4/20).
In this project, all of the design principles we learned about through the semester will be incorporated to design a digital magazine spread. We will pick the subject of the body text — food, travel, or fashion — and choose typographic fonts, color palettes, and photographs to present this information. In the end, we will have two magazine spreads and a cover to be featured in a specific mainstream publication.
Grid Exercises (4/20).
To practice identifying grids, we were given sample spreads from two different magazines and asked to uncover the underlying grids by drawing columns and rows where necessary. I used Adobe Illustrator to section off blocks of text, and the inserted lines where I felt that columns and rows were located. I then inspected these lines to see if there was a defined grid pattern to identify. Below are some of the grids I attempted to identify.
In spreads 2 and 3, the grid rows and columns were consistent across both pages. In spread 1, this is not the case, as the left page has 3 columns and the right has 4 columns. When identifying the rows for spread 1, it was unclear as to where these were placed, since the text was organized more by column.
Overall, this was a really helpful exercise in trying to identify the underlying grids in these spreads, which I will definitely keep in mind when creating my spreads.
Choosing article and reference images (4/21).
For my body text, the Cooking article appealed the most to me. I like the natural imagery the article evokes, and I think the idea of a homegrown garden is so cute for the upcoming summer season. I like how the article also included quotes from the main woman about her personal experiences growing vegetables and fruits at home, which would be cool to incorporate stylistically. The imagery of the plants is also very clear and colorful, where including stock photos of this imagery would supplement the text pretty well.
I used the resources Anna and Ji provided to look up images, and included them below.
From Unsplash:
From Pexels:
From Pixabay:
Initial Sketches (4/26).
I experimented with column grids and modular grids for my three possible spreads. It was pretty challenging to strike a balance between images and text, as well as placing the images in locations that would make the composition more interesting.
Digital Iterations (4/26).
After my 1:1 session with Anna, I had a better idea of what I wanted the magazine layout to look like. I was a bit confused on where the headline, byline, and intro went, but Anna clarified that this information belonged on the cover page.
I applied these to my digital iterations seen below.
Digital Iterations continued (5/2).
I decided to use my first spread layout during my 1:1 critique with Ji. A big issue I had was with spacing of the text/images and creating a balance between the two. Ji suggested placing an image on the whole page to balance out some of the text-heavy pages. She also suggested making the lower margin larger so that the page numbers and footers wouldn’t look cluttered. I applied these critiques to my second round of digital iterations.
I still have to place the image captions and citations, as well as the pull quote, which I hope to get feedback on during the upcoming 1:1 critiques.
Digital Iterations continued (5/4).
After getting suggestions from Anna and Ji during the optional interim critique and 1:1 session, I refined my spreads to create my close-to-final draft seen below. I made a couple major changes, including the cover page, pull quote, text/image placement of page 3, and image choice on pages 2 and 5.
I changed the cover image to something that had a blank space where text would be legible. I liked the simplicity and natural vibe that the plant gave, and thought this worked well with my earthy toned color palette. To establish hierarchy, I highlighted parts of the headline in bold green, played with the font size of the author, and likewise highlighted parts of the intro portion.
With the pull quote, I made a stylistic choice to emphasize the quotation marks and incorporated brown and green colors from the color palette.
On page 3, I positioned the text and images in a way that created a balance of negative space at the top and bottom of the spread, rather than having awkward uneven spacing as in my previous drafts. I also changed the image on the second page to better match the introduction to gardening in the article, and did something similar with the images on page 5.
Overall, I’m pretty happy with the progress I made coming to this almost final iteration, and I’m looking forward to the group critique session to get feedback from my peers.
Group Critique (5/5).
It was really cool getting to see how everyone came up with such different designs given the same articles! The variety in images and text layouts was inspiring when I made some of my edits.
It was nice to hear that the images and color palette I picked for my spreads worked well. My classmates and Anna gave thoughtful suggestions for how to tackle the large amount of negative space on the third page by spreading out the images and matching the top margin to that on the fifth page. I also added more space between the image caption/citation for the image on page 2 since it looked tight. Lastly, I got rid of some widows that I missed in the previous iteration.
Final Iteration (5/6).
After applying the suggestions from the group critique, this is how my final magazine spreads turned out:
Reflection (5/6).
After completing this project, I definitely feel enlightened and have a lot more respect for magazine designers. The use of a grid system makes the design look very neat and organized, but there’s a lot of variation in the typography and images that go into it, which I think is what makes magazine design both challenging and rewarding.
I learned a lot about emphasizing pieces of the article that were more important. I think it was cool how even though we didn’t personally write the articles, we were still able to be inspired from it when formulating our designs. Balancing the amount of text and images was the biggest challenge I faced, as I still wanted some amount of negative space to avoid overwhelming the viewer.
Overall, I loved applying all the concepts I learned from this class, especially typography and color, and seeing it come together in this final spread. This class has made me venture out of my comfort zone, but this has probably been one of my favorite classes I’ve taken at CMU so far, as it was very rewarding and unlike other typical engineering courses I’m required to take. Thank you so much to Anna and Ji, as well as my classmates, for guiding me through this design journey!
